About
About Stumpage
The public timber-sale screen for mills and buyers: every state and federal auction result on one board, read out of the public record and checked before it is published, with no bid advice attached.
What this is
Stumpage is a running board of public timber-sale results plus a set of always-current pages: one page per completed auction, rollups by region and forest, by county and by species, an upcoming-auction calendar, and a premium-over-minimum scoreboard. It is built for the people who buy public timber, mills, loggers, timber buyers and forestry consultants, who would otherwise check a state DNR site, a Forest Service page and a BLM notice by hand to see what sold and what is coming up.
Who writes it
Stumpage is published by Alex Willen. The data pages are generated from the public record on a fixed schedule; the weekly brief reads what the results say and writes it up in plain English. Every number traces back to the state or federal agency that published it, and the raw document behind every sale is kept for audit.
Where the numbers come from
Three public sellers. The Washington Department of Natural Resources publishes monthly and annual timber-auction result sheets for its state trust-land sales, scaled in MBF. The US Forest Service publishes per-forest sale-results and advertised-sale tables for its national forests, scaled in CCF. The Bureau of Land Management publishes sale notices for its western Oregon O&C timber, scaled in MBF. Nothing here is estimated or bought from a private vendor.
How a sale gets on the board
Auction results are published as documents, not as clean data feeds, so we read them. We fetch each agency's document, pull its text, and use a language model to read the sale records into a fixed set of fields. The model is told to leave a field blank rather than guess. Every extracted sale then passes a QA gate before it is published, and the raw document is retained. The full method, and every gate rule, is on the methodology page. That honesty is the whole product: the value here is a trustworthy board, not a fast one.
Where we cover, and where we are headed
Coverage today is Washington and the Pacific Northwest: Washington DNR state trust-land sales, US Forest Service Region 6 national forests, and BLM's western Oregon O&C districts. That is the honest scope right now, not the whole country. The expansion is state by state, each its own body of public auction results: Oregon (the Department of Forestry and its county sales), Idaho (the Department of Lands), and Montana (the DNRC). Those are next, not yet on the board.
Where we sit
Timber-market intelligence is sold at a price. Stumpage is the free, public-data layer beneath it: it reads the agencies' own auction results and packages the cross-agency picture no single seller publishes, the state and federal board on one screen.
What we will and will not do
We report what public timber sold for, how hard it was bid, and what is coming up for auction. We do not forecast prices. We never tell a reader what to bid, which sale to chase, or what a tract is worth to them. A sale that sold at a big premium is reported as exactly that, a fact about one auction; what it means for the next bid is the reader's call. This is not bid, appraisal or investment advice.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see exactly how each sale is read out of the public record and checked on the methodology page.